"Atari is like a bunch of minigames"

[figgler]

An interesting quote from a buddy of mine, who thinks I'm nuts because I'd rather spend a night playing VCS than XBox. "It's like they're so simple, just like the stupid minigames you find in every title you buy these days." he says.

Ok, so he can't a appreciate a good game unless it runs in 60 frames and and uses a 10-button controller - but he may be onto something here..

 

Do you think players are coming to Atari because of the rise in popularity of "Minigames". Case in point - Wario Ware is nothing but a collection of Minigames (Microgame$) for GBA and is hugely popular. Many of the games on the cartridge are comparable to Atari classics....

[Happy_Dude]

And you know why every game nowdays has minigames comparable to Atari games ???

 

The popularity of modern minigames isn't the cause of Atari's popularity but the side effect of it

[joeybastard]

The reason why Atari games kick ass and mini games are fun is simple.

 

The games are easy to learn and easy to play but difficult to master. If today's big 3D games kept that in mind there would be a lot more good games coming out these days.

[ZylonBane]

Ok, so he can't a appreciate a good game unless it runs in 60 frames

Almost all 2600 games run at 60 FPS.

[D.Yancey]

Have him play something like H.E.R.O. or Kaboom! and see if he can put them down! Maddeningly addictive! I spend a month in seclusion to get my HERO score.... talk about addiction!!

[NE146]

I see the comparison and it's pretty valid for a lot of 2600 games. But by the same token there are just as many 2600 games that have multiple screens and complexity beyond the WarioWare minigames scope (or even the minigames included in some full-scale games ala pong in Mortal Kombat, etc.)

 

Anyway whadya expect.. it's the Granddaddy!

[rust-belt]

i've been playing video games - off & on - for almost my entire life & am old enough to have played Pong when it was a new thing.

 

at some point, most of them simply became too complicated & time-consuming -- not to mention expensive.

 

i'm sure that if I invested the time, i could figure them out & have a great time playing them.

 

however, i *don't* have the time but still need my "fix". that's where atari comes in. it's easy & cheap which suits me well.

[cryptik76]

I think maybe people are becoming bewildered with the complexity of many modern games (I mean, just look at how many buttons the X-box has!). I think maybe people want to spend some time with something simple and fun once in a while. I like complex games, but sometimes I just get burned out and want to play Galaga or something.

[Shannon]

I made this point in some thread earlier before. Scrambles to find notes... ahhh too lazy...

 

Anyways I made a comment as to the popularity of mini-games and how it pertains to the simplicity of 2600 titles.

 

I also think one of the reasons is the "pick up and go" factor. It usually takes me 15-20 minutes to really get back into "the groove", or back on track in alot of modern games. With 2600 games I can just "pick up and go" and get my 20 minute arcade fix. No fuss no muss.

 

The reason for the lead time? It takes a while to remember which button combo's go with which moves. Especially if you have not played the game in a while. It almost just as hard trying to remember what goals you accomplished and which ones you were working on when you saved it.

[Mr.FoodMonster]

old skool and next gen both have thier ups and downs. old skool, you can sit down, play for a good amount of time and have fun doing it. next gen games have incredible depth and graphics. they both have major ups and downs (e.t. and conflict:desert storm ::shudders twice: but also have mind blowing games (KABOOM! and soon to be Doom 3 =D )

[Brad2600]

A lot of modern games aren't easy to pick up and play.

 

I dislike games that have so many buttons and functions to be used. I used to be able to master games like Tony Hawk but can no longer do so due to getting older. Eh well. I could probably try cracking my old high scores on the game someday.

 

Hell, I'm gonna give the old Tony Hawk 2 a shot.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Almost all 2600 games run at 60 FPS.

Or 50!

[ZylonBane]

Yah well... that's the worst-case scenario.

[Christopher Tumber]

The comparrisions I've been making are between:

 

A short story vs a novel.

 

A half hour sitcom vs a 3 hour movie.

 

A single vs a concept album.

 

One is not inherently "better" than another (except for personal taste) but they are very different experiences with their own strengths and weaknesses.

 

 

Chris...

[davidbrit2]

Almost all 2600 games run at 60 FPS.

Or 50!

 

30, actually. Unless you interlace the image, in which case, you get 60 half-frames per second. (25/50 for PAL, obviously.) I'm not sure you can do that with the TIA, though. Is it possible to interlace and get 500+ scan lines? It seems like I heard about that once...

[Thomas Jentzsch]

30, actually.

No, the VCS doesn't use interlace. ~60/50Hz is 100% correct.

 

Actually the framerates are between ~46 (Acid Drop) and ~65Hz (Artillery Duel).

 

Unless you interlace the image, in which case, you get 60 half-frames per second. (25/50 for PAL, obviously.) I'm not sure you can do that with the TIA, though. Is it possible to interlace and get 500+ scan lines? It seems like I heard about that once...

Yes, there have been a few demos at [stella] and z26 supports a special video mode for interlaced games.

[davidbrit2]

I'm just speaking from the NTSC standard. I don't know how the TIA is programmed.

 

But with NTSC, the image is scanned interlaced. You get 60 fields per second, each one consisting of half of a total frame. So there are roughly 500 scan lines total, with about 250 in each field.

 

How is the TIA controlled with respect to the television scanning?

[mos6507]

I'm just speaking from the NTSC standard. I don't know how the TIA is programmed.

 

But with NTSC, the image is scanned interlaced. You get 60 fields per second, each one consisting of half of a total frame. So there are roughly 500 scan lines total, with about 250 in each field.

 

How is the TIA controlled with respect to the television scanning?

 

 

 

Most game machines do NOT do interlace, up to and including systems like the PS1 (most games didn't use interlace mode).

 

The downside of interlace is the flicker and the comb effects with horizontal movement. This is normally not noticeable with live action, but it can be a problem with electronically generated images. Also, the gaps between scanlines are still there as they are in interlace, but because of the way CRTs work the phosphors bloom out and you don't notice them that much.

 

Only from the Dreamast era onward have we seen consoles move into interlace whole hog, despite the drawbacks.

 

Okay, this is the layman's explanation based on the discussion on Stellalist...

The alternating fields of a TV are dependent on a precise timing variation from field to field at the bottom of the frame.

 

When a TV is driven by a videogame or other electronic device that "doesn't do interlace", this signal is kept at a consistent timing from field to field, which inhibits the interlacing process.

 

This signal has to occur at the midpoint of a precise scanline.

 

Basically what's happening is the field is ending a little early, which has the effect of offsetting the scanlines by a half a scanline high on alternating fields.

 

 

In all 2600 games, the signal is always at the endpoint of the scanline, but you CAN write a kernel that forces the signal to occur at the midpoint, forcing the television into its normal interlaced mode.

 

Proofs of concept were written on Stellalist and ultimately wound up in the news at AtariAge.

 

While this mode is not that practical for the 2600 due to the added flicker and the gross difference between the effective vertical vs. horizontal pixel resolution, it still demonstrates the 2600's enormous flexibility that another "first" like this was discovered a generation after it was released.

 

We later discovered that the 2600 was not, however, capable of generating signals that could be read by closed caption decoders. Had that been possible it would have been really cool...

[+Random Terrain]

Almost all 2600 games run at 60 FPS.

 

Is that what's wrong with "Activision Classic Games" on the old Playstation, the games are running at a lower frame rate? Some of those games look like they were videotaped and then played back at a slower speed. They just don't look right (or sound right in some cases).

[davidbrit2]

Ah, okay. So it IS possible to transpose every even field up by one scanline to make a 60 fps low res display.

 

But anyway, I wouldn't really want to compare Atari 2600 games to stuff on Wario Ware, because you literally play each game within 5 or 10 seconds, excluding the boss stages and bonus games. Attention homebrewers: Make Pyoro 1 & 2 for 2600.

[ZylonBane]

Ah, okay. So it IS possible to transpose every even field up by one scanline to make a 60 fps low res display.

No. The TV doesn't decide how to interlace a picture. It only does what it's told by the signal. An NTSC signal tells a TV to do even scanlines, then odd, then even, etc. The 2600 signal only tells the TV to do even scanlines.

[davidbrit2]

So do you mean that it's possible to display all 500+ scanlines at 60fps without interlacing? I sure have never seen that done. Or do you mean that the NTSC broadcast just tells the monitor to draw the next field starting on either the odd or even scan liens? Because that's what I was getting at.

[moycon]

 

I don't play many new games that have mini-games, But I did notice that Chef's Love Shack for Dreamcast had a few and many were a play on old Atari games, Including Asteroids and Warlords.

 

I dunno if the new games make people want to go play Atari, I do think the designers now-a-days realized that those older simple games are timeless fun.

[davidbrit2]

I don't play many new games that have mini-games, But I did notice that Chef's Love Shack for Dreamcast had a few and many were a play on old Atari games, Including Asteroids and Warlords.

 

Interesting. Maybe I'll have to get a copy of that if I see it cheap.

[ZylonBane]

So do you mean that it's possible to display all 500+ scanlines at 60fps without interlacing? I sure have never seen that done. Or do you mean that the NTSC broadcast just tells the monitor to draw the next field starting on either the odd or even scan liens? Because that's what I was getting at.

The latter.

 

But there is no "transposing up" of odd scanlines. They're simply never requested.